Change Quotes

Want to respond to change with skill? Here’s how. Fill your quiver with some well-tipped words of wisdom on the art of change.

Here is a collection of change quotes to help you do just that.

I put together a hand-crafted collection of some of the best quotes about change. This change quotes collection includes quotes about life change, business change, changes of heart, and more.

Change happens. That’s the constant. You can react to it, but the real trick is learning how to respond to change. What do folks like Aristotle, Confucius, Mahatma Gandhi, Tony Robbins, and other sages of the ages teach us about change? A lot. Here are a few of the key insights: If you don’t like the change, change it. If you can’t change it, change your perspective. If change isn’t working, change your approach. If changing others, or changing the world doesn’t work, then try changing yourself. If you want to change your future, then be the change. When you don’t choose change, change chooses you. And sometimes, you just have to laugh.

I put a lot of quotes about change at your finger tips. Pick three you like and use them to help you embrace change, or ride the storm (or make one).

Top 10

“A year from now you will wish you had started today.” — Karen Lamb

“All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.” — Ellen Glasgow

“Be the change you want to see in the world.” — Mahatma Gandhi

“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” — Tony Robbins

“One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it’s worth watching.” –- Anonymous

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” — Peter F. Drucker

“The person who says something is impossible should not interrupt the person who is doing it.” –- Chinese proverb

“The question is not who is going to let me, it’s who is going to stop me.” — Ayn Rand

“When you are through changing, you are through.” — Bruce Barton

“Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change.” –- Jim Rohn

A – Z Quotes About Change

“A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.” — John Ciardi

“A lot of people get impatient with the pace of change.” — James Levine

“A Quitter never wins, and a Winner never quits.” –- Napoleon Hill

“A scholar who loves comfort is not fit to be called a scholar.” – Confucius

“All great changes are preceded by chaos.” — Deepak Chopra

“All our dreams can come true –- if we have the courage to pursue them.” –- Walt Disney

“Always remember that the future comes one day at a time.” — Dean Acheson

“Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.” — Arnold Bennett

“Any transition serious enough to alter your definition of self will require not just small adjustments in your way of living and thinking but a full-on metamorphosis.” — Martha Beck

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” — Albert Einstein

“As soon as anyone starts telling you to be “realistic,” cross that person off your invitation list.” –- John Eliot

“As soon as you truly commit to making something happen, the ‘how’ will reveal itself.” –- Tony Robbins

“Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are.” — Bertolt Brecht“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.” — Dr. Seuss

“By changing nothing, nothing changes.” — Tony Robbins

“Change always comes bearing gifts.” — Price Pritchett

“Change before you have to.” — Jack Welch

“Change brings opportunity.” — Nido Qubein

“Change in all things is sweet.” – Aristotle

“Change is inevitable – except from a vending machine.” — Robert C. Gallagher

“Change is the constant, the signal for rebirth, the egg of the phoenix.” — Christina Baldwin

“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I’ll try again tomorrow.” — Mary Anne Radmacher

“Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresea, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.” – Life’s Little Instruction Book

“Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.” — Napoleon Hill

“Each person’s task in life is to become an increasingly better person.” — Leo Tolstoy

“Even if you stumble, you’re still moving forward.” – Anonymous

“Every failure brings with it the seed of an equivalent success.” –- Napoleon Hill

“Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

“Every single thing changes and is changing always in this world. Yet with the same light the moon goes on shining.” – Saigyo

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” — Leo Tolstoy

“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” — John Kenneth Galbraith

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” –- Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.” — Robert F. Kennedy

“Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.” — C.S. Lewis

“God grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know it’s me.” – Anomyous

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” — Reinhold Niebuhr

“Growth is the only evidence of life.” — John Henry Newman

“He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.” — Francis Bacon

“He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.” — Harold Wilson

“Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you’re alive, it isn’t.” — Richard Bach

“Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves!” — Andre Gide

“Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.” —- Alan Keightley

“Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me.” — Carol Burnett

“Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.” – Confucius

“Our only security is our ability to change.” — John Lilly

“Others can stop you temporarily – you are the only one who can do it permanently.” –- Zig Ziglar

“Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.” –? Heraclitus

“People don’t change. Only their costumes do.” — Gene Moore

“Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator and change has its enemies.” — Robert F. Kennedy

“Remembering you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” — Steve Jobs

“Someone was hurt before you, wronged before you, hungry before you, frightened before you, beaten before you, humiliated before you, raped before you… yet, someone survived… You can do anything you choose to do.” – Maya Angelou

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” — Henri Bergson

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that’s all.” — Oscar Wilde

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” – Anonymous

“Turbulence is life force. It is opportunity. Let’s love turbulence and use it for change.” — Ramsay Clark

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” — Mark Twain

“Unless you’re willing to have a go, fail miserably, and have another go, success won’t happen.” — Phillip Adams

“Use what talents you possess, the woods will be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.” — Henry van Dyke

“We all have big changes in our lives that are more or less a second chance.” — Harrison Ford

“We can have more than we’ve got because we can become more than we are.” –- Jim Rohn

“We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all of the power we need inside ourselves already.” — J.K. Rowling

“We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.” — John Steinbeck

“What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.” — Havelock Ellis

“What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.” — Mignon McLaughlin

“When in doubt, choose change.” — Lily Leung

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” — Victor Frankl

“When you jump for joy, beware that no one moves the ground from beneath your feet.” — Stanislaw Lec

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” — Mark Twain

12 Comments on "Change Quotes"

I like Ghadhi’s “be the change you want to see in the world” – helps me both at work and with the family, especially kids.
I love Ayn Rand’s “… who’s going to stop me” a lot – resonates ton with what’s going on in the US and the rest of the world.
I made a significant change in my life and I am constantly looking back trying to answer the question “was it worth it?” – Jack Welch helps me here with his “Change before you have to”, that’s what I did and I am not looking back anymore.
But I think the most moving is this “One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it’s worth watching” – this one really hooked me.

I am both a pack rat and a lightening rod when it comes to quotes. People send me their favorite quotes all the time and I stuff them away in my personal knowledge base, and then periodically I create an organized collection on a topic to share with the world.

I think the right words seriously lift us in ways we can’t even predict.

Thank You for such a thurough list. I’m writing an Essay on a single word for my college english class. I decided to use the word, “change.” In doing so has again encouraged personal-inventory. Something we should all do periodically, yet is seen rarely. Again, Thank You. Sincerely, Maria

Thanks J.D, For these wonderful quotes and literally life changing blog. I have read so many blogs before on self help but there is something about your blog that keeps me getting back for more every single day. I like the first and fifth quote in top 10. It gives me the dopamine kick!

Thank you once again god bless!
Charles D’Souza

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I am J.D. Meier, the best-selling author of Getting Results the Agile Way. I help people get better results in work and life. Learn more

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